January 2024 Edition

Happy New Year!

I hope this note finds everybody well, happy, healthy, and on a great upward climb in 2024. It’s exciting to be reaching out like this because I’ve been kind of a Luddite when it comes to communicating with you. I remember back in the day responding to all your emails from the Watauga County Public Library in Boone, NC when we had a Yahoo address. Well, that stayed my main method for about 15 years years and, while everyone else moved on to Myspace and Facebook and onward, I was still sending y’all emails from libraries. Nowadays I’m trying to take advantage of all the ways to be more engaged, and honestly, I wish I had started sooner because I love being in touch.

You all lead such interesting lives and have such unique backstories. I’m always meeting someone by the buses or in a restaurant before the show (sometimes an antique shop) who reminds me how much I love our Old Crow friends. Maybe they made a request or told a story about someone they lost or are bringing their 87-year-old mother to the show (hope that old-timers from Kentucky had fun!). I find these sorts of interactions inspire me to tailor the night’s concert to who we’re singing for.

It was no exception at this year's New Year’s Bash at the Ryman. I met Brits in the parking lot who gifted us each a matching mug with our name on it. In the alley between the Ryman and Robert’s, I met a mom who told me she planned to name her newborn Ketch (go for it…just be ready for the condiment jokes!). I met up with families whose kids survived the Covenant shooting, and they sobered me and helped me see how our town’s greatest heroes aren’t singers or politicians, famous or powerful, they are the people who show us how to face adversity with grace, grit, and determination. But the people I met before the year-end Ryman shows who most touched my soul were the guys I started this band with: Willie Watson, Critter Fuqua, and Benny Gould. The last time the four of us were all on stage together was at our Grand Ole Opry debut on January 13th, 2001 when Marty Stuart brought us out during the Jogging In A Jug segment of the broadcast. Our families had all come to Nashville for the show and we served a big brunch at our flophouse on Dickerson Road. Well, this year we also had a big brunch and I made my famous scratch biscuits and sausage gravy (and tofu scramble for all the vegetarians). While the coffee percolated, we jammed to some favorite old songs, ones we hadn’t sung in years like “Charlie Poole’s Milwaukee Blues” and Blind Willie McTell’s “You Got to Die” and “The Butcher’s Boy” which I think Willie got from the Blue Sky Boys. As we played, I looked around the dining room table at my amazing brothers-of-the-road and their families filling their plates with biscuits and gravy (grits, hash browns, and flapjacks) and I thought good gawd I’m sure headed into 2024 on a lucky note.

Every so often musicians will try to write their future into a song, hoping it will come to be. This happens because songwriting is so much like dreaming. As a songwriter, I draw from experiences (like in “O Cumberland River”, I love to paddle my canoe to downtown Nashville) and I also draw from fantasies (like in “Alabama High Test” where I’m running from the law). But occasionally I’ll also put my immediate hopes into a song, hoping they’ll come to fruition. One example of this is in a song I started fooling around with when I was 17 called “Rock Me Mama”. I had hitchhiked a little by then (don’t tell my mother), but I’d always hoped to go on a hitchhiking odyssey on a long stretch of road. By writing a song like the one that became “Wagon Wheel” I put those intentions to the wind. Then, 2 years out of high school I made a 4-day hitchhiking trip through Appalachia to visit my grandfather’s hospital room in Central Ohio. I even went through the Cumberland Gap (I got the geography right this time). Songwriting lets me dream but sometimes it even sets me up to live my dream. A more recent example of a song like this is on our new album Jubilee, it’s called “Miles Away”. I wrote it with the help of Molly Tuttle and at first I was set on calling it “Saddlehorn”, because the saddle horn in the third verse came to symbolize the tool for getting over grievances. It goes:

So if you run into some lost friend or lover and find only reticence remains
Grab the saddle and just throw your body over
Don't let the past (don’t let the past, don’t let the past) hold the reins 

Somewhere in my songwriting mind, I could see us all together again, Benny and Critter and Willie (and Kev, and Ahearn, and Shani, and Kinman, and Rawlings, and so many more) the originators of this 25-year odyssey traversing the globe with fiddles and banjos blazing. When we sang “Miles Away” together at the Ryman on the last night of the year I was struck by that full circle moment where a recent intention was met full on, and a dream was made real, and that line about the circle being unbroken felt like an ultimate truth for the ages, and the feeling it gave me—to put it plain and simple--was pure joy, ya’ll. 

Well, I’m glad we’re in touch. It's becoming easier and easier to do like the old ad says and “reach out and touch someone.” I didn’t even have to go to the public library to write this, which is good because Nashville just had its biggest snow in decades and nothing's gonna be open for days. Sure looks pretty out there, a town full of possibilities waiting to thaw. 2024 is full of possibilities. I hope yours has a lot of blessings in store. Promises of health and joy, and opportunities to shine. Maybe even some reunification with some people you love a lot and owe a lot to, who, through time & circumstance you have grown distant from. If that’s the case, I’m here to tell ya---don’t wait. Go for it. You’ll be thankful you did.

Hoping to see you in your town in 2024, and you're all invited to join us in Nashville for the 15th installment of our New Year's Eve tradition at the Ryman.

Until then…

Love,